Feb.12

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

Musk, Trump Speak to America

At the end of 2025, when the various dictionaries reveal their choices for "word of the year," we suspect "surreal" will make a strong showing because there is much of that in the current presidential administration. Of course, "surreal" is just a fancypants version of the word "weird," so it's not like anyone can say we didn't see this coming.

The latest demonstration of surrealism came yesterday, in the Oval Office, courtesy of Co-Presidents Elon Musk and Donald Trump. While the junior co-president sat at the Resolute desk and said relatively little, the senior co-president stood and addressed a group of reporters about his work as head DOGEy. That included some unscripted remarks, as well as a question and answer session. If you would like to watch it for yourself (it's about half an hour), the footage is here.

What was surreal about it? Here is a partial list:

• Trump, as we note, did not talk very much.
  
  
• A child, roughly 5 years of age, entered the frame almost immediately, wanting Musk's attention. We assume he is one of the senior co-president's children, as he eventually ended up on Musk's shoulders.
  
  
• Musk delivered a fairly extended, and somewhat rambling, lecture on democracy. He explained that you cannot have a democracy where unelected people, like the bureaucracy, have more power than elected officials, because the unelected people are not responsive to "the people." We will concede that he has something of a point here. We can certainly think of at least one unelected person who is entirely unresponsive to "the people," and whose work is entirely undemocratic, and who should be cashiered immediately.
  
  
• Musk delivered an even more extended, and even more rambling, description of the work he has ostensibly been doing for the last few weeks. Maybe he's just not a good public speaker, or maybe he was under the influence of cocaine or some other stimulant, or maybe both, but we feel sorry for staffers at his companies who have to listen to him and then try to turn his words into action. And it is clear that we were not the only ones who could barely make sense of what he was saying. When Musk finally stopped for questions, none of the reporters in the room jumped in the way they normally would. The silence in the room was obvious enough that Musk joked about it (though he's not very funny).
  
  
• The most representative part of Musk's monologue, and the one that's getting the lion's share of the attention, came around the 8:40 mark of the video above, and might be called "The Parable of the Limestone Cavern." He took at least 3-4 minutes and at least 1,500 words to unspool a lengthy tale of government inefficiency, specifically in the area of processing federal employees' retirement paperwork.
  
  There was actually a valid point buried within the long and unfocused harangue. Despite the fact that we're many decades into the computer age, the retirement paperwork is processed manually, which adds some extra amount of time and cost. Such is the power of inertia. As you can see, we were able to explain the problem in roughly 40 words, not 1,500, which would have taken 10 seconds if we'd delivered them verbally. As to the limestone cavern, which Musk was really fixated on, it's a real thing, but absolutely irrelevant to his point. The cavern is a giant former mine, outside of Pittsburgh, that, by virtue of its geological characteristics, naturally maintains the proper temperature and humidity for the storage of paperwork. It's actually an example of government efficiency, not inefficiency, since, as anyone who has checked their electric bill recently knows, artificial air conditioning and heating are not cheap.
  
  It's possible that Musk does not understand what's going on, and that he's legitimately flummoxed by the use of the limestone cavern as a storage facility. On the other hand, this is also the kind of "nugget" that gives the slash-the-budget crowd something memorable to latch onto. You know, something like: "The national debt grew by $1 trillion this year. Wonder how many limestone caverns we're paying for now?"
  
  
• Musk and Trump both used the classic trick, which is also a regular part of their performances, wherein they claimed to have found outrageous things, but without offering any proof of their claims. For example, Musk decreed that some people are collecting Social Security checks up to the age of 150 (in other words, decades and decades after their deaths). Trump claimed that DOGE has already found hundreds of billions of dollars in waste. We suppose that latter assertion could possibly be true, if you are someone who regards spending on things like public broadcasting, school lunches, and healthcare as "waste."
  
  
• Musk, in response to a question, claimed that DOGE is "the most transparent" organization he can think of, and certainly the most transparent part of the federal government, as currently constituted. Every time he uttered the word "transparent," we were reminded of the line from The Princess Bride: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
  
  
• Musk said the keys to cutting the budget deficit are "competence" and "caring." With those qualities on his side, he claimed he cannot fail.
  
  
• Musk offered remarks on macroeconomics that are either ignorant or are magical thinking. He said that once he cuts the budget deficit by $1 trillion annually, the government will borrow less money, so interest rates will be lower, which means people will not spend as much on their car payments and mortgages, so that they will have more money for food and other necessities, which will also be cheaper because of economic growth.
  
  
• Trump, during one of his contributions to the discussion, asserted that he did not understand why so many judges don't want him to look for corruption and waste. Needless to say, this is not why Trump had ended up on the wrong end of a dozen injunctions already.
  
  
• Trump: Biden bad. That is all.

Ultimately, the purpose of the whole dog and pony show was to add some fanfare prior to Trump signing a new XO about the powers of DOGE. It tells the heads of the federal agencies to cooperate with DOGE, to get to work on reducing staffing, and to see to it that for every four people who leave government employment, only one new one is hired. That should work out well. (Z)